Allen Ginsberg’s classic poem “America” is one we tend to trot out around this time (like every Thanksgiving, it’ll be William Burroughs’ “Thanksgiving Prayer” and every Allen’s birthday, it’s dogwood flowers).
So here it is again.
and here’s, of interest, (included in Gordon Ball‘s edition of Allen Ginsberg’s Journals – Mid Fifties 1954-58 ), an early draft, or early poem, early working, with that title, written shortly after “Howl”.
The last line echoes down the ages – “Betrayed!, Betrayed!”
AMERICA
I’ll sing of America and Time
for as I lie in my bed alone one night
I ruminated with my secret soul
in ancient rhetoric
“Inspire me tonight with a dreamlike poem
foretelling in rapt naturalistic forms
the fate of this country I hide in
penniless and lovelorn waiting for the barren
doom of my own days:
Illuminate your tragic
wisdom, my darkest deepest countryman,
reveal in shorthand and symbolic images
the paradigm of fortune for United States;
witness the downfall and roar of daily life,
in riches and despair amid great machinery,
lacking miracke of heart, in habitude to substantial
trashy world, its dreams and miseries of steel,
for all the natural fatness, universal toys
prayed for, granted and betrayed:
let the unknown,
unknowable, shapeless and foreboded future be once
limbed clearly, particularized in thought and set
down solid for the eye to wonder and receive, so I can
salvage some remnant of the truth
of all society out of my solitary craze –
Dark America! toward whom I close my eyes for prophecy,
and bend my speaking heart
Betrayed! Betrayed!